Drawn chiefly from Chet Atkins, Merle Travis, and bluegrass banjo traditions, Doyle Dykes launched his career as a teenager by playing guitar with his family’s gospel ensemble across Florida, soon joining tours alongside the Crusaders and J.D. Sumner’s Stamps. He stepped away from performing to settle back in Jacksonville, wed his high school sweetheart, and take up what he viewed as stable, non-musical employment. Restlessness drew him back to the instrument; a Nashville contact then placed him in the touring band of country singer and Hee Haw regular Grandpa Jones. Three years later he left once more, this time to enter the ministry, yet continued adapting classic hymns for unaccompanied guitar. Still driven to treat music as his primary calling, he reemerged as a solo instrumentalist, issuing the spiritual collections Fingerstyle Guitar (1996) and H.E.A.T. (1997) on Step One before signing with Windham Hill and introducing his label debut, Gitarre 2000, in 1998.
